The Squatter Three Cornstalks And The Well - Analysis

A bush fable that laughs at everybody’s hands

Lawson frames this as a mock-truthful “tale” that is really a rigged morality play. The cast is bluntly symbolic: The Squatter (property, authority), three cornstalks (workers, young men, “Cornstalk” slang), and a Well (a shared necessity). The poem’s central claim isn’t simply crime is bad; it’s that in a world organized by wages and supervision, cheating becomes a contest of cunning, and the “moral” gets delivered by whichever side can manipulate the rules at the end.

The singing refrain—Sin and sorrer—keeps interrupting like a pub chorus that pretends to mourn while enjoying the story. Those stage directions—slowly, apprehensively, triumphantly, then more dismally than ever—make the tone wobble between comedy and doom, as if the poem can’t decide whether to condemn the trick or admire it.

“Full of pluck” vs “full of sin”: a loaded introduction

From the opening, Lawson stacks the deck with moral labels: the Squatter is full of pluck, the Cornstalks are full of sin, and the well is half full of muck from many rains. It’s funny because it’s too neat. A well clogged by weather isn’t anyone’s vice, yet the poem puts “sin” into the workers before they do anything—hinting that moral judgment here is a kind of class reflex, not a careful verdict.

The wages are itemized with fiddly precision—five-and-twenty bob a day, then broken down to eight-and-four each—which gives the story a ledger-book realism. That detail matters: the poem is about how money makes people count, and how counting invites schemes.

The Cornstalks’ dodge: manufacturing work to keep the pay running

The job is straightforward—cleanse the well of mud and clay—and they do it quickly, a day or two. Then comes the “awful sin”: they decide to make the job last out. Their method is almost slapstick in its labor: they tipped a drayload down at night and haul it up next day, even greasing dray-wheel axles so The super wouldn’t smell the dodge. The comedy depends on the sheer effort of the fraud: they are working hard to create useless work, a grimly recognizable pattern in any pay-by-the-day system.

There’s also a quiet insult in the Squatter’s ignorance. He never dreamt the sand and clay was three miles off, which makes him look sheltered, not “plucky.” Yet that distance—three miles—also shows how far the Cornstalks are willing to go to keep wages flowing. Their “sin” is energetic, organized, and communal.

The hinge: the boss “gets something in his eye”

The poem turns when the Squatter notices something—got something in his eye—and the narrator jokes It wasn’t green. The line pretends to deny greed while practically underlining it. The Squatter’s counter-scheme is elegant: he claims the well was rather dry and orders them to fill it up again. In other words, he uses the same material—muck and clay—as a weapon, turning their fraud into a trap. The Cornstalks want the well to stay endlessly dirty so the job continues; the Squatter wants the well to become impossibly full so payment can be delayed.

When the mullock wouldn’t all go in, the workers twigged the ruse but can only stall with a weak technical excuse: the clay is loose and needs time to settle down. That phrase becomes the Squatter’s cudgel. He rages he won’t settle up until the clay is settled down, converting their language into a legalistic refusal to pay.

Who is the sinner when wages can be postponed forever?

The key tension is that the poem’s moral labeling keeps slipping. The Cornstalks commit the first clear “crime,” but the Squatter’s response is not justice; it’s retaliatory exploitation. His threat—Before my cheques yer’ll pocket, boys / Yer’ll put a mountain in a well—is deliberately impossible. He doesn’t merely stop the scam; he creates conditions where the workers can never be finished, and therefore never be paid. The refrain’s “sorrow” starts to fit better here: the system can always out-cheat the cheater.

The “MORAL” that winks while it scolds

Lawson ends with a stated lesson: when you do go in for crime / You mustn’t overdoo the thing. It’s a joke-moral, because it doesn’t say don’t commit crime; it says commit it with moderation. That wink matches the chorus-like singing that grows triumphantly even in a “dirge.” The poem’s sharper implication is that in a workplace ruled by supervision, contracts, and delayed cheques, morality gets flattened into strategy: the worst mistake isn’t sin—it’s misjudging who has the power to define when the job is “settled.”

One unsettling question lingers: if the Squatter can always demand the clay be “settled down” before he “settles up,” what would honest work even look like here? The well starts as a practical need, but by the end it’s a bottomless argument—proof that the real muck isn’t only in the hole; it’s in the terms of the deal.